D.H. Lawrence discussion

OK, so I'm going to finally start some discussion here, in the hopes that someone takes the bait: my current favorite is a scene that seems to be about Ursula's first sexual experience in The Rainbow. I'm recounting from memory, so feel free to challenge me, but there was a scene in a barn, or in the rain, where she and her first lover get into something that sure sounds like 'sexual congress', though it might just be heavy petting. I will look up the passage and we can go over it.

Mostly I just keep coming back to Lawrence's depiction of the country and the details of Nature and how it affects our protagonists. I don't think The Rainbow is his best book (of my four reads that would still have to be Women in Love) but I do love how it follows several generations of family, ending in the climax of the rainbow.

I agree about The Rainbow (so far, it actually is my favorite Lawrence). I think the technique of allowing us to watch the progress of several generations really allows him to explore both the (very Lawrencian) inherent tension between male and female, as well as the issue of familial taint or familial purity, though of course his 'purity' was reviled by his contemporaries and got him branded a pornographer. I like following the Brangwens, not the least because of the strange 'golden thread' of . . . (Brangwen-ness?) I suppose sensuality would be the best word, or maybe earthiness of a people tied to the land, and the strange separation from it that comes with both modernisation and gentrification of the family. Women in Love could not happen reasonably unless to the scions of the Brangwen family, who, whether they know it or not, are heiresses to this struggle, and their adventures are a modern continuation of the same thing that attracted their forefather to the strange foreigner and her to the quiet, bird-eyed man who became their father.